Scrape flash

flashscreen-scraping

I'd like to scrape a website to programmatically collect any external links within any flash elements on the page. I'd also like to collect any other text, if possible, but the links are the important part. Is this possible? A freeware library/service to accomplish this task would be preferable, but if none is, how can I accomplish the task on my own? Is it possible to get the source code and pull from that?

Best Answer

Decompiling the Flash source would let you see the ActionScript part of the Flash file, which I've found to often contain info like links.

A free decompiler is Flare. It's command line only, and works fine. It won't decode some of the info in newer Flash formats (>CS3 I think). It dumps all the AS into one file.

Sothink SWF Decompiler is a more sophisticated commercial program. It will work fine with any Flash file I've tried and the results are quite thorough and well organized. it's GUI based and I don't know if it is easily automated.

With Flare, since it's a command line tool, one could easily write a script to obtain the SWF, decompile it, grep for 'http://', and log the results.

Related Solutions

R – Flash/Flex Cursors

To set the the "Hand" cursor, as soon as the mouse hovers over a element you have to specify these properties:

  <mx:VBox 
       useHandCursor="true"
       mouseChildren="false"
       buttonMode="true">

However this only works for the Hand cursor. Also take care of the required mouseChildren attribute. You either have to set this to false to achieve the cursor for all contained items or you have to specify the attributes useHandCursor and buttonMode for all elements. However the side effect of settings mouseChildren to false is that all mouse events (mouseOver, mouseOut, click,...) on child elements will no longer work.

In case you want to use a different cursor than the hand cursor I am afraid you have only two possibilities:

Replace the standard hand cursor by your cursor
Use the mouseOver and mouseOut events to set the cursor programmatically.

Python – the best way to programmatically log into a web site in order to screen scrape? (Preferably in Python)

You can try Mechanize (http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/) for programmatic web-browsing, and definitely use Beautiful Soup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) for the scraping.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Flash/Flex Cursors

Python – the best way to programmatically log into a web site in order to screen scrape? (Preferably in Python)

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